An ideogram is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object.
Chinese characters are ideograms primarily used in the writing of Chinese. Learning to read handwritten Chinese takes practice, even if a student of Chinese already knows the characters. There are two main reasons:    1. Most people's handwriting is not anywhere near as neat as printed letters or standard computer fonts. Writing clearly takes practice and time; most people simply can't be bothered. The result is either sloppy, cursive or both. This is faster to write, but harder to read.    2. People write characters differently, so even if the student has learnt how one person writes, it's not a given that the student also understands what someone else writes.
Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence. In machine learning, a computer or computing device is programmed to think like human beings so that the computer may be taught to learn on its own. The development of neural networks has been key to teaching computers to think and understand the world in the way human beings do. Many deep learning networks such as Cellular Neural Networks or Cellular Nonlinear Networks (CNN) have been developed in the past decade. However leaning handwritten Chinese characters are still a challenge. Many prior approaches require a relatively large computer system using filter coefficients based on floating point numbers.
According, it would be desired to have an improved method and system for optical recognition of handwritten Chinese characters using a CNN based integrated circuit.